Birth of War – Aeneid 7 page 1 THE BIRTH OF WAR -- A Reading of Aeneid 7 Sara Mack In this essay I will touch on aspects of Book 7 that readers are likely either to have trouble with (the Muse Erato, for one) or not to notice at all (the founding of Ardea is a prime example), rather than on major elements of plot. I will also look at some of the intertexts suggested by Virgil's allusions to other poets and to his own poetry. We know that Virgil wrote with immense care, finishing fewer than three verses a day over a ten-year period, and we know that he is one of the most allusive (and elusive) of Roman poets, all of whom wrote with an eye and an ear on their Greek and Roman predecessors. We twentieth-century readers do not have in our heads what Virgil seems to have expected his Augustan readers to have in theirs (Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Apollonius, Lucretius, and Catullus, to name just a few); reading the Aeneid with an eye to what Virgil has "stolen" from others can enhance our enjoyment of the poem. Book 7 is a new beginning. So the Erato invocation, parallel to the invocation of the Muse in Book 1, seems to indicate. I shall begin my discussion of the book with an extended look at some of the implications of the Erato passage. These difficult lines make a good introduction to the themes of the book as a whole (to the themes of the whole second half of the poem, in fact). Erato herself suitably introduces the main subject of this essay: Virgil's focus, throughout the book, on female characters, from Caieta at the beginning to Camilla at the end. ERATO A new day is at hand (or so it seems) as the Trojans finally arrive in the promised land, and Virgil marks the occasion grandly with a new invocation: Now, Erato, be with me, and let me sing of kings and times and of the state of things in ancient Latium when the invaders first beached their boats upon Ausonia's coasts, and how it was that they began to battle. o goddess, help your poet. I shall tell of dreadful wars, of men who struggle, tell of chieftains goaded to the grave by passion, of Tuscan troops and all Hesperia in arms. A greater theme is born for me; I try a greater labor. (M 45-55) The first question thinking readers are likely to ask on reaching this passage is, "Why Erato?" Any undergraduate who knows anything at all about the Muses knows that Clio (history), Calliope (epic), or maybe even Melpomene (tragedy) would be a better choice than Erato to help out an epic poet in need of inspiration. Indeed, in the most famous ancient depiction of Virgil, the third-century A.D. mosaic from Tunis, the poet is depicted with a tablet on his lap on which Musa mihi causas memora ("Tell me the reason, Muse," 1.8, M 13) can be read, with Clio on one side and Melpomene on the other. Why does Virgil call on Erato? Birth of War – Aeneid 7 page 2 Obviously Erato's name suggests love or desire, and it makes a kind of sense for her to head a book which is infused from beginning to end with Virgil's love for his native land, expressed again and again as he gives one area after another its moment in the sun. Virgil includes most of the Italian countryside in Book 7, mainly but not exclusively through the catalogue of warriors at the end. The book opens with a lovely evocation of the beautiful grove at Ostia full of brightly colored birds "caressing the heavens with their song" (aethera mulcebant cantu, 7.34, my translation). Virgil has chosen not to follow the tradition that brought the Trojans in further south by the river Numicus (the river where Aeneas is traditionally supposed to have died); instead he lands them right at Ostia, which was later to be Rome's busy maritime emporium, full of businesses announcing their trade in grand mosaics, full of houses and temples and eating places, as the visitor today can still see in the very impressive ruins. Thinking this bustling Roman settlement out of existence, Virgil creates, as Aeneas' first stop in Italy, a deserted place of natural beauty and peace. (The moment, like all peaceful moments in the Aeneid, is brief-only 120 lines later Aeneas begins to transform the landscape by building Ostia's very first settlement-a military camp.) The warriors described in the catalogue come from all over Italy: from Caere in Etruria, from various parts of Latium, from the Sabine territory, from all over Campania, from among the Aequians, the Marsians, the Rutulians, and the Volscians. What is more, Virgil turns geographical features into people and makes them leaders of armies from areas that have no connection with their own. This tactic allows him to cover most of the map of Italy, as Professor Louise Adams Holland told my college Virgil class years ago. Almo and Galaesus, the first casualties of the war, are rivers, the Almo a tributary of the Tiber, the Galaesus a river in Calabria. Virgil gives each an identity in his death: Almo, the oldest son of Tyrrhus; Galaesus, a man as just as he is rich. Messapus, who is clearly to be connected with Messapia in the toe of Italy, is made the leader of forces from Southern Etruria; Ufens is a Volscian river turned into the leader of Aequians from Nersa. Halaesus, the traditional founder of Falerii, comes from Campania. Modern students find all catalogues boring, it seems; Italians of Virgil's day were no doubt pleased to hear of their little piece of the country playing a role all those years ago when Aeneas arrived from Troy. Surely Erato helped Virgil express his affection for all these places, some of them no longer in existence, others no longer of any importance in the twenties B.C. Erato must have been hard at work when Virgil created one of the most exquisite pathetic fallacies in Latin literature in his lament for Umbro near the end of the book. Umbr-priest, snake charmer, and healer from Marruvia-was unable to "heal the hurt of Dardan steel" (Dardaniae medicari cuspidis ictum, 756, M 994) despite his skill, and his homeland mourned for him (all this before the battle really even begins): "For you Angitia's forest wept, the crystal / wave of the Fucinus, for you bright lakes" (te nemus Angitiae, vitrea te Fucinus unda, I te liquidi flevere lacus, 75960, M 997-98). I feel sure that Erato inspired that lovely coupling of person and place and tragedy. Birth of War – Aeneid 7 page 3 A first-time reader of the Aeneid is not likely to connect Erato with the poet's task, as I have just done, however. Whatever else it may suggest, the call on Erato indicates that the poet needs fresh creative force and new momentum to tackle what lies before him. (Similar is his invocation of the Muse in Book 1 when he gets to the difficult task of trying to understand the causas, the "reasons," for Juno's hatred.) Who better than Erato to keep him from flagging now as he begins the second movement of his epic? The language throughout the invocation suggests toil, ordering, and creation: expediam ("I will disentangle"); revocabo ("I will recall or call back into being"); exordia ("beginnings"). The word exordium is a term from weaving: the warp that will form the basis of the woven fabric. Sound and meaning connect exordia with ordo (ordering, arrangement) in the last line. Erato is to preside over a new birth (nascitur ordo); a new order is coming into being in history and in poetry, firmly linked with Italy. And the major ordo (grander, more significant ordering or order of things) requires a maius opus (greater work, construction, epic poem). The subject matter of the second part of the poem will be grander, the events more significant; something new is coming into being, and the birth process is difficult. It is easy to imagine that the prospect of getting the second half of the poem right was daunting to Virgil. How was he to create a worthy prehistory for Rome? How to express his love of Italy while showing its ambiguous nature? How to paint the Trojan arrival as both a return home and an invasion? The war in Latium as at once a civil war, a replay of the Trojan war, and a pre-enactment of historical Rome's fifth- and fourth-century Latin wars as well as the civil wars of the poet's own day? Erato has a big job ahead of her. In the triumphantly climactic words: maior rerum mihi nascitur ordo ("a greater theme is born for me"), a Roman would hear the ringing opening of Virgil's Eclogue 4: magnus ab integro saeclo rum nascitur ordo ("the great order of generations is being born anew"). In the Eclogue, the poet is proclaiming the beginning of a new golden age. Here in Book 7, he reminds us of that earlier golden-age dream, now that Roman history is about to begin with Aeneas' arrival in Latium, the very place where Saturn presided over the original golden age (8.319-25, M 18-26). Virgil is not just marking the end of Aeneas' Odyssey; he is marking the mythological-historical moment when Troy can begin the process of merging with Italy to become Rome.